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ADDRESS 

/ 

GENERAL THOMAS EWING 

at the 

Centennial Celebration 

at 

MARIETTA, OHIO, JULY i^th, 1888, 

of the 

SETTLEMENT OF THE NORTHWEST TERRITORY. 



( Second Edition. ) 



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This address is published for the Woman's Centennial Associa- 
tion of Marietta, Ohio, and is offered for sale by it for the benefit of 
a Pioneer Memorial Fund, at 25 cents per copy. The Fund is to 
be applied toward the construction of a monument or other memo- 
rial of the patriotic men and women whose services and sacrifices in 
the cause of liberty are so beautifully and feelingly portrayed in 
the address. Contributions to the Fund and orders for the address 
are earnestly solicited and may be sent to either of the undersigned, 
at Marietta, O. 

MARY C. NYE, 
SOPHIA D. DALE. 

Oct. 1888. 



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THOMAS EWING 



ADDRKSS. 



Ladies and Gkxtlemkx: 

In tliis centennial celebration of the first set- 
tlement of the North-West Territory, and the estab- 
lishment of civil government therein, to-day has been 
set apart for special commemoration of the pioneers by 
their descendants. As a grandson of George Ewing, 
who was one of the early settlers, and, like almost all 
of them, a soldier of the Revolution, I have the honor 
and pleasure to preside on this occasion. 

We assemble here with the representatives of 
the commonwealths of Virginia and New York, who 
gave the North- W^est Territory to the Republic, and of 
those young and powerful states formed of it, to com- 
memorate the crlorious and beneficent event. But 
many of us come with more than the general interest 
of American patriots in the occasion. We are the de- 
scendants of that immortal band through whose enter- 
prise, statesmanship and love of their fellow-man this 
wilderness was settled, and the foundations of freedom 
in the new Republic laid. A hundred years ago, in 
block-houses and stockades built on yonder plain where 
the lovely Muskingum pours her fioods to the still 
more beautiful Ohio, our fathers and mothers lived in 
the forest ; tilled their patches of corn; fed their cows; 
hunted game, and marched in procession each Sunday 
to church, in armed and incessant preparation against 
the savage. I heir mutual loves, trusts, sorrows, sac- 
rifices, and all the noble passions born of common trials 
bravely met, have vanished from earth, but have puri- 
fied and strengthened them for a nobler life above. 



With what happiness do they not look down to-day on 
their descendants assembled here in proud and loving 
remembrance of their deeds ? On the hundreds of 
thousands scattered over the Republic who are honor- 
ed in being known as their kinsmen ? On the great 
plain of forest and prairie bounded by the Ohio, the 
Mississippi and the Lakes, which, when they settled 
here, was inhabited only by wandering savages, and 
which now comprises the homes and temples of thirteen 
millions of people, in five great states as prosperous, 
intelligent and humane as any on ^earth — the earliest 
daughters of the Republic — the first states planted in 
the soil of American liberty, and ripened in its sun. 

All peoples celebrate those events of their nat- 
ional life which most strongly illustrate their chara'cter 
and gratify their pride and aspirations. Among the 
notable events of American history from Columbus to 
Lincoln, I know of none which more deserves general 
and perpetual commemoration than this. I include of 
course not only the migration of our forefathers to "the 
Ohio Country," but also the great charter of freedom 
which they caused to be enacted, as a condition prece- 
dent of their settlement, and bore with them as the ark 
of the covenant to the promised land. 

Thitherto our settlements — along the north- 
ern lines where they were resisted by the savages — had 
pushed westward cautiously, hugging the frontier ; 
creeping like an infant close to its mother's knees. 
This was the first stride of population; the first wave of 
the great tide, hitherto unexampled in human history, 
which rose, and surged, and swept on across the conti- 
nent. That ambition and high spirit of adventure ; 
that noble discontent with mean and cramped environ- 
ments ; that longing and struggling for larger oppor- 
tunities, and higher fields of action, which are now 
characteristics of the American people, have had their 



o|Dportunitics and their consequent growth in the nii- 
orations among which this stands pre-eminent. 

The Alleghanies and the great rivers were 
barriers, high and deep, between the old states and the 
North- West Territory, which the tomahawk of the 
savage guarded from individual settlement. The war- 
like Shawnees, Wyandots and Ottawas, who had been 
fighting the colonies for thirty years — in the pay of the 
French before the Revolution, and in that of the British 
durinof and after it — were still armed and hostile. Great 
Britain had signed a treaty of peace at Versailles in 
1783, in which, after long resistance and with great re- 
luctance, she recognized our claims to the North-West 
Territory. But this concession was mortifying to the 
ruling classes in England, and caused the downfall of 
Lord Shelburne's Cabinet w^iich made the treaty. A res- 
olution of censure was voted by the Commons — Lord 
North, wdio led the opposition, declaring that "the 
ministry should have retained for Canada all the coun- 
try north and west of the Ohio." The resolution was 
adopted by the Lords after a debate which attracted 
the largest assemblage of Peers of the reign of George 
III — in which debate the complaint was that Lord Shel- 
burne "had given up the banks of the Ohio, the para- 
dise of America." The Coalition Cabinet, led by Fox 
and Lord North, which followed, and the succeeding 
ministries, resorted to every artifice and subterfuge to 
retain the territory. In open violation of the treaty, 
they still held and garrisoned all the western forts, 
where the hostile savages always found sympathy 
and support. They went so far as to build and 
strongly garrison a new fort, called Fort Miami, where 
the town of Perrysburg, Ohio, now^ stands. Early in 
I 794 Lord Dorchester, having just arrived from Lon- 
don, addressed an Indian Council on the Maumee, and 
predicted an early renewal of hostilities between Great 



Britain and the United States. Thereupon Congress 
laid an embargo on all British vessels ; and the House 
passed a joint resolution of non intercourse with Great 
Britain until she should abandon the western forts, 
which was defeated in the Senate by the casting vote of 
Vice-President Adams. The Confederation was too 
poor and dispirited — and too much distracted by rival 
claims to the territory set up by New York and Vir- 
.ginia — to conquer the savages and expel the British. 
Gen'l William Henry Harrison once said that the Rev- 
olutionary War was not over until August 20th, 1794 
— six years after the settlement at Marietta — when 
" Mad Anthony " Wayne, under the eyes and guns of 
the garrison at Fort Miami, crushed the savages and 
extinguished the hopes of their British allies. 

Throughout the five years from the close 
of the Revolution to the settlement at Marietta, the 
dominion of the North-W^est had been thus drifting away 
from the feeble, discordant, ungoverned Confederacy. 
To save it from being lost to the new Republic, it was in- 
dispensable that Virginia and New York should surren- 
der their claims to its ownership. This they did in due 
time and with lofty generosity and patriotism. It was then 
necessar)' that the Confederation at once sell lands to 
agricultural and semi-military colonies , and pass 
a law for the government of the territory. This 
it did by its contract with the Ohio Company; and by 
the Ordinance of 1787 — both acts being passed in July 
of that year. 

This legislation was obtained only by the pa- 
tient and persistent efforts of leading members of the 
Ohio Company, aided by the constant and powerful in- 
fluence of Washington. Their efforts began at New- 
burgh on the Hudson in 1783, when our army lay in 
its encampment there awaiting the conclusion of peace. 
A petition to the Continental Congress was prepared 



and signed by 283 officers and enlisted men, setting 
forth the necessity of taking the territory out of the 
possession and control of Great Britain, and expressing 
the desire of the petitioners to receive their arrears of 
pay in parcels of land comprising a compact and fertde 
body to be selected and set apart for settlement by 
them. 

The petitiontTs were generalh' poor. After 
eight years of service away from their homes, their 
businesses were closed against them. To the loss of 
aptitude and opportunity for civil pursuits, which are 
the common and heavy penalties for patriotic service in 
the army, were added the exhaustion of private re- 
sources through the almost worthlessness of the money 
in which they were paid, and finally the failure to pay 
them at all. They were bound to each other by mem- 
ories of their long and eventful military career, by a 
common love of adventure, and a desire, as they had 
to begin life anew, to begin it in the new country and in 
a settlement of soldiers who, inured to hardships and 
familiar with dangers, could take care of themselves. 
This petition to Congress was intrusted to their belov- 
ed commander — to him towards whom, throughout the 
long night of the Revolution, all eyes had turned as to 
that northern star, 

" Of whose true-fixed, and resting quality. 
There is no fellow in the firmament." 

Washington urgently pressed their petition on 
the attention of the Continental Congress, then sitting 
at Princeton. No action was taken. He presented 
and urged it again to the Congress when sitting at An- 
napolis. Still even /us appeals failed to arouse that 
body to a sense of the justice and sound policy of the 
proposed legislation. I have heard m\' father say that 
Mr. Webster once showed him a pamphlet published at 



Salem, Mass., in 1786, which set forth in glowing- and 
truthful terms the attractive character of " the Ohio 
Country," and the necessity of taking prompt posses- 
sion of it by a semi-military colony. It described the 
splendid rivers and lakes which bounded the territory, 
and distinctly prophesied that ere long steam would be ap- 
plied to navigation upon them. The pamphlet was anon- 
ymous, but Mr. Webster said its putative author was Dr. 
Manassah Cutler, to whose keen intellect and ready 
tongue and pen the company was indebted for the leg- 
islation which gave it success. It was prepared, no 
doubt, after General Tupper's tour to the west, in the 
fall of '85, and about the date of the organization of 
the Ohio Company at the "Bunch of Grapes Tavern," in 
Boston, March ist, 1786. It was only by means of such 
efforts and inHuences, protracted through four )-ears, 
that the Continental Congress was sufficiently aroused 
to the importance of holding and occupying the North- 
West Territory, to give the pioneers the legislation 
indispensible to their great undertaking. 

This legislation having been obtained, a bold 
act b}' the Ohio Company — a bugle call — was needed 
to command the attention of the American people and 
demonstrate at once the practicability and the method 
of settlement here. Such an act was the march of Put- 
nam's band from Massachusetts to Marietta, commenc- 
ing at Danvers, early in December, 1787, and 
ending on this spot, April 7th, 1788. The physical 
difftculties to be overcome on the way, and the dangers 
attending the settlement, would have appalled any but 
the hardiest of men impelled by a great and unselfish 
purpose. Many large rivers had to be crossed, dense 
forests traversed, and pathless mountains covered with 
snow, where no wheeled vehicle could be moved and no 
supplies obtained; and the colony had to settle down in 
the wilderness bevond the mountains and the great river, 



there to support itself by agriculture, surrounded by 
armed and hostile savagfes who were incited to violence 
by the British garrisons, with no reserved resources, and 
with a mere semblance of a government five hundred 
miles away, too poor and inert to help it even in the 
direst extremit)-. 

Putnam's daring and successful expedition ex- 
cited the wonder and admiration of the country. It 
dispelled the fears which had enveloped the unknown. 
It called back to the landless people of the states, 
cursed by monopoly under large grants from kings and 
lords proprietors, to come west and own homes and 
govern themselves, in the glorious expanse which be- 
longed to all the American people. New Jersey heard 
the call, and Symmes followed in the same year with 
his colony to the Miamis. Virginia heard it, and her 
patriot soldiers eagerly took possession of the lands be- 
tween the Scioto and the Little Miami, reserved for 
them in the act of cession. The impoverished soldiers 
of the other colonies came flocking; and thus the veter- 
ans of all the thirteen states, who had together shed 
their blood on the battlefields of the Revolution, again 
commineled it in the generations which have since oriven 
Ohio her proud pre-eminence. O, glorious state! O, 
nobly born! If there be a state of the Union which 
may boast of the pre-eminence of her soldiers and 
statesmen for a generation gone by, without offense to 
her sisters, surely Ohio may. For is she not the first 
born of the Republic; of the blood of heroes from all the 
colonics; the first typical, composite, American state ? 
And were not the children of these heroes born poor; 
strengthened in mind and body by strenuous effort; rear- 
ed in communities cursed by neither rank, luxury nor 
hopeless poverty ; under a governnient devoted to free- 
dom, intelligence and christian morality; and in a new 
land so blest in skv, soil and waters as to seem to have 



8 

been specially fitted by the Almighty for the highest 
development of man. 

Probably no large migrations of men occur 
without a special Divine purpose and direction. The 
exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt was visibly 
and audibly under God's guidance as a preparation for 
the Messiah. The hordes of Goths and Visi-goths, 
whom the populous north 

" Poured from her frozen loins to pass 
Rhene or the Danaw," 

were sent to invigorate the effeminate Latin races they 
subdued, by the admixture of hardier blood. The Cru- 
saders, though they failed in the pious and ambitious 
aims of centuries of struggle, brought back from the seats 
of civilization on the Mediterranean a knowledge of 
mathematics, literature, and song, which civilized and 
softened our savage ancestors. The landing on Ply- 
mouth Rock of a band of that stern and God- 
fearing democracy who smote the first Charles and 
were smitten by the second, fore-ordained the separa- 
tion of the colonies from the crown. None of these 
migrations, save that of the Israelites, was more surely 
under divine guidance than this, or was followed by 
more beneficent and far-reaching results. In this 
movement the Divine purpose apparently was to open 
the interior of this almost unoccupied continent to 
settlement by the oppressed and hardy poor, not only of 
the colonies, but also of Europe, where each family 
could dwell under its own vine and fig-tree ; to found 
states, for the first time in human history, in that 
liberty and equality for which Sidney died, and which 
Jefferson proclaimed in the declaration of independ- 
ence ; and through the influence of such new states to 
establish freedom and equal rights throughout the 
Republic, and in time throughout the world. 



The curse of land monopoly had blif^hted most 
of the colonies. The grants to the Duke of York, 
Lord Delawarr. Lord Baltimore, Lord Fairfax and 
others, covered vast domains of the best lands which had 
been sold b\- them generally in great tracts to wealthy 
holders. The evil of laro^e holdinofs was beincr fostered 
and perpetuated in many states by laws of primogeni- 
ture and entail, and by limiting suffrage and offices to 
land owners, thus establishing, as far as practicable, a 
landed aristocracy. 

A second curse was slavery — the twin and ally 
of land monopoly ; both operating to degrade labor ; 
both repelling immigration of poor wdiite men ; both 
enemies of democratic-republican government. In the 
heat of the struggle for independence, the thirteen 
revolted colonies, except Rhode Island and Connecti- 
cut, abolished their ro)'al charters and formed state 
governments. One would expect to find in these battle- 
born constitutions broad and effectual declarations of 
human rights. Yet in not one of them is slavery for- 
bidden. In the constitution of Delaware alone was the 
slave-trade, or the introduction of slaves from other 
states, prohibited. In the Federal Constitution, which 
was being formed by a convention at Philadelphia 
when the Ordinance of 'Sy was enacted by the congress 
in New York, every clause which touched the institu- 
tion of slavery w^as intended to protect and strengthen 
it — the clause for the restoration of fugitive slaves — for 
preventing the prohibition of the African slave-trade 
prior to 1808 — and for increased representation in 
congress to slave-holding communities in proportion 
to the number of their slaves. In the original draft of 
the declaration of independence, one count of the in- 
dictment against the Crown was that it had fastened 
slavery on the colonics, but that count was afterwards 
stricken out as not constituting a grievance. The slave- 



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trade which British o-reed had estabHshed was carried 
on after the revolutionary war under the American 
flag in ships saiHng- from northern ports ; and it was 
by northern votes in the constitutional convention that 
the traffic was protected until 1808. That was a hard 
saying of Judge Taney in the Dred Scott case that in 
the opinion of those who formed and ratified the Fed- 
eral Constitution, "black men had no rights which white 
men were bound to respect." It shocked, and angered 
the North, and was generally denounced as untrue. 
The declaration was too broad, but if limited to the 
great majority of the people, it was true. There were 
among our forefathers many political disciples of Mil- 
ton, Russell and Algernon Sidney, — who worshipped 
Liberty and were ready to die in her cause. Of such 
were the men of the Ohio Compan)-. But while we 
recollect their love of liberty, and remember too how 
Jefferson, looking at slavery in the colonies and the 
slave-trade between them, exclaimed — " I tremble for 
my country when I reflect that God is just," — we are 
painfully aware of the fact that a large majority of the 
American press, and public men, and people, — North 
and South alike, — saw nothing to condemn in African 
slaver)-. In fact it was forbidden nowhere in Christen- 
dom, and every commercial nation was engaged in the 
inhuman traffic. 

The general lack of the vital flame of democ- 
racy in the Confederation is further illustrated by the 
fact that, in only four of the states — Virginia, New 
York, North Carolina and Rhode Island, — was there 
absolute freedom of religious opinion. In but three, — 
New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania- 
was there provision for common schools ; and in less 
than half of the eleven new state constitutions are to 
be found bills of rights containing the habeas coj^piis 
and other safeguards of liberty. 



1 1 



From a Congress representing- states tlie 
most of which were so deficient in republican Hfe, so 
wedded to slavery and land monopoly, so out of chord 
with the declaration of independence, the forecast and 
determination of the Ohio Company, risini^ high above 
the interests and political morality of the day, secured 
the enactment of the Ordinance of 'd>j, and the needed 
legislation for sales of the public lands in small parcels, 
with liberal reservations for schools and colleges. 

The ordinance of '87, for which the world is 
indebted so largely to the Marietta Colony, stands 
pre - eminent among free institutions of govern- 
ment. All the fundamental propositions of civil 
and relio'ious libertv, now recoo^nized as the American 
Magna Charta, are declared therein, not merely for the 
government of the territory, but also of the five states 
to be formed therein ; and for a perpetual covenant 
between those states and all of their sisters, present or 
to come. These guarantees found no place in the 
federal constitution until four years after the passage 
of the ordinance, when they were incorporated among 
the first two amendments. It is worthy of special note 
that in that ordinance the union of the states is declar- 
ed to be forever indissoluble. The omission of a simi- 
lar provision from the constitution of the United States 
— an omission believed to have been necessary to effect 
its ratification — left the door ajar for secession, and 
contributed largely to the great rebellion. 

The limitless expanse of rich lands in the 
west open to purchase from the government at low 
prices, on long credit, and in small parcels, attracted 
the hardy and homeless sons and daughters of toil from 
the original states and from all northern and central 
Europe. The tide of migration, after covering Ohio, 
swept on to the Wabash, to the Mississippi, to the far- 
thermost shores of the Lakes, until each of the live 



12 

States of the northwest took her constitutional liber- 
ties from the Ordinance, as she set her star in the blue 
field of the Union. Still onward the tide of migration 
swept — beyond the Mississippi to the Missouri; over 
the Missouri to the fabled American Desert; across the 
so-called desert to the Rocky Mountains; over the 
Rockies to the Sierras; and clown the Sierras to the 
sea, until eight more states had followed the example 
of the five formed out of the North-West Territory. 
xAnd at last the constitutions of all the once slave states, 
and the federal constitution itself, have adopted from 
that ordinance the first Vv'ords of prohibition of human 
slavery ever enacted into law — the most beneficent and 
imperishable sentence in our annals — which, from the 
day of its insertion in the Ordinance of '8y, tolled the 
knell of slavery throughout the world : " There shall be 
neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, otherwise 
than in punishment of crimes whereof the party shall 
have been duly convicted," 

The Marietta Colony were thus in a large 
sense the emancipators of the slaves, and the archi- 
tects of ihe Republic. They led into the union thirteen 
states free born ; which never wore the collar of col- 
onial subjection , or bred a slave , or had a religious, land 
or money qualification for office or suffrage ; where men 
owned their own homes and tilled their own fields; 
where labor was blessed and honored ; states which 
when the gauge of battle was flung down by slavery, 
welcomed the fight with an enthusiasm which swept all 
before it , and, by destroying slavery, made the Republic 
free, fraternal and perpetual. 

Sir Archibald Alison, in his " Principles of 
Population," printed in 1840, speaks with wonder and 
admiration of the migration on our western frontier, — 
a vast army of occupation, moving resistlessly, with a 
front of a thousand miles, one flank restinor on the 



lakes, the other on the gulf, and making an average 
progress of i 7 miles per year; the advance column fel- 
ling the forest, building cabins and farming roughly, 
while behind them followed another column of more 
wealthy settlers, to bu)' out the pioneers and complete 
the work of agricultural improvement. He says noth- 
ing like this has been known in the history of man; and 
he fails to see what is " the impelling force." Had 
he reflected that these men, whether coming from 
the older States or from Europe, had almost all 
been tenants and paid rent for their homes and 
for the right to till the soil ; and that here 
under our generous and beneficent policy each settler 
had his choice of land for a home out of millions of 
acres, under a government deriving all its powers from 
the settlers themselves, he need not have searched 
further for "the impelling force" which sent wave after 
wave over the Atlantic and the Alleghanies, to spread 
to the Pacific. 

The lives of many of the pioneers have been 
published, and others may still be told from family 
records and traditions. They were men such as 
rarely, if ever, united in so small a community. A 
large proportion of them had received a collegiate edu- 
cation. Among them were ver\' many officers of the 
Revolution ; some of high rank and distinction who 
enjoyed the personal friendship and confidence of 
Washington ; and without known exception they were 
men of probity and courage. In this large audience 
are many of their descendants who it is expected will 
contribute to the story of their trials, sufferings and 
joys. For myself, I have but a few words to say of 
my grand-parents who were among the early settlers 
here. 



H 

Broken in fortune by a military service which 
extended from the campaign against Quebec, a year 
before the declaration of independence, to the close 
of the war of the revolution, Lieut. George Ewing 
removed with his family from Cumberland County, 
New Jersey, to West Liberty, in "the pan-handle" of 
Virginia, where he made a temporary home in 1787 — a 
year before the first settlement at Marietta. Here my 
father, Thomas pLwing, was born, Dec. 28, i 789. Three 
years later my grand-parents with their seven children 
and all their worldly possessions floated down in dug- 
outs to Marietta, where they were assigned quarters in 
one of the block-houses on Campus Martins. They 
soon after joined a colony which built and occupied the 
stockade at the mouth of Olive Green creek, on the 
Muskingum, a mile or two above where the pretty town 
of Beverly now stands. I once visited the grave-yard 
of that little garrison, and read this inscription carved 
by my grandfather on a sand stone which he erected 
over the body of one of his comrades : "Here lies the 
body of Abel Sherman, who fell by the hand of the 
savage, August 23, 1792." My grandfather kept a full 
and interesting journal throughout the revolutionary 
war, half of which was lost at the Pension Of^ce, and 
the other half is one of the priceless treasures of our 
family ; but his diary ended with his military service, 
and he left not a line about his life in the stockades 
at Marietta and Olive Green. In 1798 he removed 
from the Muskingum to Ames township, in Athens 
county, where he opened a farm eight miles from any 
neighbors. 

My father used to tell that in 1805, when 
he was a lad of about 16, he was at work in his 
father's corn-field one evening, and was hailed by 
a well-mounted gentleman who wished to be enter- 
tained all night. Father, with prompt hospitality, 



15 

took his liorse, and showed him into the cabin, hut was 
distressed to find that grandfather treated him with 
marked coldness. Next morning, as the stranger rode 
off on the bridle path towards Marietta, grandfather 
said with oreat feelincj, that that man was Aaron Burr, 
who slew Alexander Hamilton. lUirr was then prose- 
cuting the schenies for which soon after he and Blenner- 
hasset were indicted for treason. Father recollected 
his sprightly conversation, which Grandfather's coldness 
could not chill. He also remembered seeine. when 
a boy, the lovely and unfortunate Mrs. Blennerhasset, 
on the main street in Marietta, riding a spirited and 
gaily caparisoned horse. She was dressed in a scarlet 
riding habit, with an ostrich plume in her hat — a vision 
of beauty to this child of the forest. She had ridden to 
town from her magnificent island home near by, to do 
some shopping. 

In looking over the published biographies of the 
first settlers of Marietta, I find next to nothing about the 
pioneer women, whose exposures and perils called for 
the highest courage and sacrifice. The men were gen- 
erally veterans of the army, accustomed to personal 
danger and exposure, and rarely shaken by alarms. The 
women came from comfortable homes, and braved not 
only long and exhausting journeys with their children, 
but also the perils and the appalling terrors of the 
savaoe. The men built the cabins ; but the women 
made the homes, 

" And a charm o'er each scene of the wilderness threw 
More sweet than the noise of its fountains." 

When a boy, I often heard from the now silent 
lips of women of that era — from the accomplished and 
charmino- Mrs. General Goddard, of Zanesville, Mrs. 
King, of Lancaster, Mrs. Morgan, of Champaign county, 
and from my father's sisters — tales of heroism of Ohio 



i6 

women which seemed to me loftier and finer than any 
of the pubhshed tales of the frontier. I have a letter 
from a kinswoman in Westfield, N. J., telling me of a 
trip made to Cumberland county, in that state, in the 
year 1790, by a woman from the border of the North- 
west Territory, who came there after a long absence on 
a last visit to her aged fath*. r and mother. She was the wife 
of a soldier of the Revolution who had emigrated to the 
far west after the war ended. She had made the lonor 
journey from the Ohio, over river and mountain, by 
liood and fell, through an almost trackless wilderness, 
on horseback, unattended, carrying a boy baby in her 
arms. No man ever boasted of his lineage with loftier 
pride than I, when I say that that brave and loving 
woman was my grandmother, and the baby my father. 

Doubtless there are hundreds of like instances 
of dauntless love among the pioneer women of Ohio, 
worthy to become historic. Must the memory of their 
courage and sacrifices perish, because displayed only by 
women and in the forest ? And, as men have neglected 
the theme, are there not brilliant women among their 
descendants to rescue from oblivion some of these true 
tales of the border ? 

And now, my friends, on this spot, hallowed 
by the struggles and achievements of our forefathers, 
let us resolve to cherish and hand down the precious 
memory of their courage and fidelity to freedom. May 
God forever bless Ohio, and all her sisters, and the im- 
perishable Union of the States. May He grant that, 
ere another centennial be celebrated here, this Republic 
will have led the World by its silent and shining example 
to that blessed consummation when every dynasty shall 
be dethroned, when every army shall be disbanded, and 
when every people shall rule themselves. 



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